| Announcing a WOMEN WHO LEAVE
Virtual Event! |
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Did you miss our offsite event at AWP last month? Join us April 18, 8 PM EST/5 PM PST for a conversation and Q&A with Sonora Jha, Lyz Lenz, Maggie Smith, & Reema Zaman. Hosted by Kelly McMasters and presented by The Rumpus. These 5 writers explode traditional story arcs of a beginning, middle, and end. Instead, they explore alternate ways to move through narrative--in fiction, memoir, essay, and poetry--and reach toward the more complex and powerful movement of moving on. Suggested donation of $20. Pay what you can, no one turned away due to lack of funds. All proceeds after processing fees will support The Rumpus's 2024 contributor pay. |
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Interviews & Reviews
Chelsea Voulgares interviews Marie Mutsuki Mockett about The Tree Doctor
“I want people to feel that the unexpected is always happening around us...”
Lyle Rhytis reviews Jennifer Croft's The Extinction of Irena Rey
“The Extinction of Irena Rey is an empathetic and comic investigation of the role of the translator within the literary project.”
Christina Wood interviews Hannah V. Warren about Slaughterhouse for Old Wives' Tales
“The natural imagery in these poems feels like home—azaleas, sunburnt muck, and swamp.”
Kristin Dykstra reviews Silvia Guerra's A Sea at Dawn
“As the reader gets deeper into the book, the poems propose to rearrange the reader’s mind and emotions, unsettling the calm exterior.” |
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New Fiction & Columns
NEW! Rumpus Original Column: Beyond the Page
"We Are Not Numbers"
Our inaugural spotlight features the work of poets and mentors writing and volunteering with We Are Not Numbers, a youth-led nonprofit project in the Gaza Strip.
Fiction: "embody" by Sara Bastian
“we watch our mothers sweat in front of televisions—tapes growling in the vcr; women yell through screens to never give up because a moment on the lips is a lifetime on the hips...”
Essay: "Corey Sobel, Strictly Speaking, Doesn't Exist" by Corey Sobel
“One way to look at adulthood is that it’s the gradual matching up of your childhood fears with their threats and seeing how harmless the whole really is.”
Rumpus Original Column: Sketch Book Reviews
The Complete Gardener
“Don not only imparts practical advice, but gets into some deeper philosophical perspectives on the creation of a garden and why they are so valuable.”
Essay: "What Would E.T. Do?" by Greg Wrenn
“Like the paleontologist I saw on Reading Rainbow, I sifted through the mulch with the paintbrush of my hand to find roly-polies. If I was careful in the far corner of the playground, I could stay clean.” |
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| Announcing an open call to join The Rumpus's inaugural CAPACITY-BUILDING BOARD. Are you an advocate for indie literary organizations? Do you enjoy sharing your skills and expertise? Are you someone who sees a way to help and takes action? If the answer is “YES” to all of the above, we’re looking for Board Members like you!
The Rumpus remains an outlier as a widely-read lit magazine that is not connected to any academic institution or wealthy benefactor, or does not exist as part of a larger publishing company. This indie spirit allows us to be a platform for work that moves our editors—not what necessarily responds to markets or trends. This also means that we rely primarily on volunteer labor and reader-support to keep The Rumpus afloat. The Rumpus needs a capacity-building board to ensure this work can continue and become sustainable for many years to come! |
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We're inviting 3-6 volunteer board members through a public call. This will complete our initial cohort, totaling 9-12 board members, who will collaborate to help us achieve fiscal sustainability.
We’re accepting applications NOW THROUGH MARCH 31. |
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| Letters in the Mail (from authors!) |
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Letters in the Mail from authors is a Rumpus subscription in which you receive an actual, postmarked letter from one of our favorite writers in your IRL mailbox twice a month. All letters are non-promotional, include a creative prompt, and have a return mailing address in case you'd like to write the author back!
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| Next up in our Indie x Indie
POETRY BOOK CLUB:
Death Styles by Joyelle McSweeney
x Nightboat Books |
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For our September 2023 - August 2024 selections (and possibly beyond!), we’ll focus on great new poetry collections AND hear from the indie publishers behind the books with our new Indie x Indie Poetry Book Club format!
Join by midnight April 15, to receive our MAY Poetry Book Club pick Death Styles by Joyelle McSweeney and join our subsciber-only conversation with author Joyelle McSweeney, a Rumpus editor, and Nightboat Books Co-Founder and Editor Kazim Ali.
As a subscriber, we'll send you a copy of this book the first week of MAY and you'll also be invited to an exclusive online video discussion with the book's author + the author's editor + a Rumpus Editor and fellow book club members. Subscribers are encouraged to join in the chat with their questions before and during the conversations. These will take place on the Rumpus' Crowdcast channel and will remain available to subscribers for 1 month after they take place.
About May's Poetry Book Club Selection: In this follow-up to her award-winning collection, Toxicon and Arachne, Joyelle McSweeney proposes a link between style and survival, even in the gravest of circumstances. Setting herself the task of writing a poem a day and accepting a single icon as her starting point, however unlikely—River Phoenix, Mary Magdalene, a backyard skunk—McSweeney follows each inspiration to the point of exhaustion and makes it through each difficult day. In frank, mesmeric lyrics, Death Styles navigates the opposing forces of survival and grief, finding a way to press against death’s interface, to step the wrong way out of the grave.
About the author: Guggenheim Fellow Joyelle McSweeney is the author of eleven books of poetry, drama and prose, a well-known critic, and a vital publisher of international literature in translation. McSweeney’s recent books include Death Styles (Nightboat Books, 2024) and Toxicon and Arachne (Nightboat Books, 2020), which earned her the Shelley Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America. Her 2014 essay collection, The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults, is widely regarded as a visionary work of eco-criticism. With Carmen Maria Machado, she was the guest editor of Best American Experimental Writing 2020. She also collaborated with Don Mee Choi on translations of two short stories by Korean modernist Yi Sang, featured in Yi Sang: Selected Works alongside translations by Jack Jung and Sawako Nakayasu (2020). With Johannes Göransson, she co-edits the international press Action Books. She lives in South Bend, Indiana and teaches at Notre Dame.
About the Press: Nightboat Books, a nonprofit organization, seeks to develop audiences for writers whose work resists convention and transcens boundaries, by publishing books rich with poignancy, intelligence and risk. |
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Reader Support Keeps The Rumpus Going! |
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| Founded in 2009 in San Francisco, CA and now based in Asheville, NC with readers and editors all over the US and abroad, The Rumpusis one of the longest-running independent online literary and culture magazines. Our mostly volunteer-run magazine strives to be a platform for risk-taking voices and writing that might not find a home elsewhere. We lift up new voices alongside those of more established writers readers already know and love. Often, we are an emerging writer's first notable publication, which is something we’re really proud of. We believe that literature builds community—and if reading The Rumpus makes you feel more connected, please show your support! Our Membership and subscription programs along with tax-deductible donations made to The Rumpus through our fiscal sponsor, Fractured Atlas, help keep us going and brings us closer to sustainability. |
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